The United States of America Part 12

The presidential election of 1800 was epoch-making in several meanings of the term. It was a reaction against the bold and defiant att.i.tude of the party in power. It was a revolution of the people. Yet it was neither a dissolution of all government, as it appeared to the defeated, nor a permanent conversion of the people to democracy, as the victorious element was inclined to consider it. Sixty years later, the people would rise against the victorious party, grown to be a slave-truckling organisation, overscrupulous of the individual when the world was turning to aggregation, and would take the sceptre from them for a quarter of a century at least. The ma.s.ses punish arrogance in a party as in an individual. Unlimited success is always fatal. No sooner has the party pa.s.sed the safety-line in one direction than the tide of popular favour turns in the opposite way and leaves it stranded. Owing to such reaction, the National Government has never approximated anarchy on the individualistic side of Jeffersonianism, nor has it been in danger of monarchy under Hamiltonian centralising principles at the other extremity. To-day it is as far from the ideals of the one as the other. Controlled constantly by centrifugal and centripetal forces, the fixed orbit of the Union has been maintained.

The election of 1800 marked the first transfer of the national control from one party to another. So accustomed has time made us to these changes, that it is difficult to appreciate the anxiety with which the people of that day awaited the transition. Well-known party issues, announced in party platforms, now give a fair a.s.surance of the policies to be pursued. Yet no serious suggestion emanated from the Federalists that they would not yield to the ballot. Fitness for self-government was again demonstrated, especially when contrasted with some other American nations, by the peaceful eviction of one party, yielding to no more warlike weapon in the hands of its opponents than the suffrage of citizens.

The anxiety of the hour was increased because the national machinery had suddenly come to a standstill. The defect predicted by its enemies and feared by its friends had suddenly appeared in the method of electing a President. According to the Const.i.tution, each elector wrote two names upon his ballot. The man receiving the highest number, if a majority, was declared President, and the next highest, Vice-President.

Every Republican elector chosen in 1800 had written upon his ballot the names of Jefferson and Burr. Consequently neither was elected, because neither had a majority. The superiority of Hamilton over Jefferson as a party manager is manifest by the fact that Hamilton had feared a Federalist tie in the election of 1789 and had taken steps to prevent it.

The Republicans were now in a quandary. John Adams had received only sixty-five votes, cut off with one term, a vicarious sacrifice, as he thought himself; yet neither Jefferson nor Burr was elected, each having seventy-three votes. Various rumours disturbed the peace. It was said that Congress would appoint a President for the interim; that Adams would hold over; or that Hamilton, disappointed in not being made President, would turn dictator. Governor Monroe promised Jefferson that he would immediately re-convene the Virginia a.s.sembly "should any plan of usurpation be attempted at the federal town." Monroe's remedy was an amendment which would correct the Const.i.tution in this particular. The fathers had not foreseen this precise accident, but, in their wisdom, had provided a remedy for a defective election by casting a decision in the House of Representatives, the most popular body next to the electors.

Jefferson had undoubtedly been the choice of the people, and his selection had been the intention of the Republican electors. This was ultimately accomplished in the House. An amendment to the Const.i.tution was adopted before the next election to prevent the recurrence of such an accident, and the Union had by good fortune pa.s.sed a crisis in a presidential election second only to that of 1876.

The discomfited Federalists sought an explanation for their defeat in everything save their own actions. After only twelve years, and twelve years pa.s.sed in creating an efficient from a deficient government, the people had turned against them. "No party ever existed knew itself so little," said John Adams, "or so vainly overrated its own influence and popularity as ours. None ever understood so ill the causes of its own power or so wantonly destroyed them." State debt a.s.sumption, the bank, the excise, the increased debt, the war expenditures, the direct taxes, and the Alien and Sedition laws would seem to furnish a sufficient list of reasons for the downfall of a party, which came into the Administration by only three votes. Yet, by common consent, the blame for the defeat was placed on the aliens and their presses.

"A group of foreign liars," was the forceful way in which the defeated President explained it, "encouraged by a few ambitious native gentlemen, have discomfited the education, the talents, the virtues, and the property of our country." Chagrined that Was.h.i.+ngton should have two terms and he cut off with one, smarting under the treacherous letter of Hamilton, to which he speedily framed a reply, the ex-President "trotted the bogs" back to Ma.s.sachusetts, as he termed it, without paying his successor the courtesy of waiting to see him inaugurated.

Gadsden, the old Revolutionary leader of South Carolina, now relegated to the line of spectators, lamented the short-sightedness of early days in not sufficiently guarding American citizens.h.i.+p from the admission of foreign meddlers. "Our old-standers and independent men of long, well-tried patriotism, sound understanding, and good property,"

said he, "have now in general very little influence in our public matters." He wished the advice of John Rutledge had been taken. He would have admitted only the sons of aliens to citizens.h.i.+p.

The new President was to the manor born, but he held theories dangerously akin to those put forth by the foreign faction, against which the Alien and Sedition laws had been aimed. Speculative philosophy, however philanthropic in its intent, was heresy to the practical Federalists. Hamilton, in the midst of the uncertain election, was reported to have given in a toast his preference for "a dreamer rather than a Catiline," as between Jefferson and Burr. During the campaign, pamphlets appeared describing Jefferson as a wild philosopher, one who believed the savage more independent and happy than the civilised man; who preferred newspapers to government; who believed that a little rebellion now and then was a good thing; who esteemed property and obligations of so little value as to declare that the actions of one generation were not binding on the next; who justified the excesses of the French Revolution by saying that if only an Adam and an Eve were left in every country and left free, it would be better than it had been before. Memories of Tory confiscations and penalties were sufficiently fresh to give credence to a rumour that the President-elect contemplated such retributive measures toward his political opponents. Memories of the disunion sentiments contained in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions were still fresher, although Jefferson's close connection with the latter was not yet generally known.

Thomas Jefferson was an exponent of the democracy of his day, and with him democracy came into the National Administration. The "well-born"

were discomfited. Yet it was not the democracy of Andrew Jackson's time. It was a democracy reflected from Europe like everything else in America at the time. It was the democracy of Montesquieu and the encyclopaedists. It was a democracy which could be led by a college graduate and lawyer, who was also a gentleman farmer and a large landholder, bound to his party by a country residence, by being a borrower, and by speculative theories. Only such aristocratic democracy was possible on the Atlantic coast-plain. Pure American democracy would be born only after advancing civilisation found a majority in the mid-valley of the continent, with the barrier of the Alleghenies at its back. It reached a crude form in Andrew Jackson, the Indian fighter, and a slightly higher type in Abraham Lincoln, the prairie lawyer.

Jefferson's democracy in the abstract was a kind of political millennium, in which the people collectively exhibited traits quite different from their individual components. The people, to Jefferson's mind, were unselfish, by nature good, and needing no restraining bonds.

They were their own censors. His democracy in the concrete took the shape of a great uprising of the people in 1800, temporarily led astray from the true principles of self-government by the undue influence of Alexander Hamilton acting through the moneyed interests, but returning joyously and regenerate to the path of const.i.tutional rect.i.tude. The election of 1800 he p.r.o.nounced as real a revolution in the principles of government as was that of 1776 in its form; the material difference being that one was effected by the sword and the other by the rational and peaceable method of suffrage. Jefferson had no more conception of a modern political party than had Was.h.i.+ngton,--the latter because he saw in them only factions; the former because his party embraced the entire people.

For several years, it is true, Jefferson had been directing the pens of his lieutenants in the various States, circulating sound Republican literature, patronising Republican newspapers, and tabulating Federalist defeats as skilfully as a modern political manager. He encouraged the people to ma.s.s-meetings or county conventions of delegates. This was probably the beginning of the county political machinery. He lamented that the South had no towns, such as New England had, which would make smaller units for popular gatherings. The Federalists scorned this political machinery as too trivial and feared it as too popular. It would have a tendency to make the people less amenable to the control of their leaders. They preferred to continue the Revolutionary custom of committees of correspondence to manage party affairs.

All this herculean effort was felt by Jefferson to be necessary to win popular attention and support from the centralisation of Hamilton, which, to his myopic vision, was monarchism. Years after, he testified that nothing on earth was more certain than that if he, placed by his office of Vice-President at the head of the anti-monarchists, had given way and had withdrawn from his post, the people would have given up in despair and the cause of liberty have been lost. By his efforts, and the aid of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, the Const.i.tution and the Union had been saved when "at its last gasp."

As the time of Jefferson's inauguration approached, rumours of revolutionary action grew into a general alarm lest all the union-making of twelve years should be annihilated and the Federation days be brought back again. Jefferson's well-known antipathy to taxation and a national debt caused a rumour that he planned repudiation of the national obligation, perhaps an agrarian law, and even the distribution of all property. The vested interests were as much alarmed as ever they were in subsequent elections. "We have seen," cried one holder of national certificates and a subscriber to the bank, "the French clergy stripped in a night. One vote of Congress would put our federal debt into the family tomb with the paper money of Revolutionary days." Among the measures supposed to be contemplated by the victorious "mobocrats,"

as the Federalists called them, were the abolition of the United States Senate, destruction of foreign commerce and public schools, the abolition of internal taxes, the annihilation of the bank, and the Europeanising of the country by French immigrants. "G.o.d is punis.h.i.+ng the manifold sins of this nation by delivering it over to projectors and philosophists," said a New England clergyman. Governor Strong, of Ma.s.sachusetts, appointed a day of fasting and prayer, that the first magistrate and other rulers of the nation might rise superior to private interests and the prejudice of party. The lower branch of Congress had gone over to the Jeffersonians, and the upper House would be lost after the next session. No check was possible upon the reformers.

Although neither partisans nor people were in such dangers as imagined by the Federalists, the National Government might have been seriously impaired by Jefferson and his followers, if necessity had not been most fortunately on the other side. The contest was very unequal, as well for Jefferson as for his successors who struggled conscientiously but vainly against natural laws. Jefferson was misjudged by those who p.r.o.nounced him opposed to all union. He was always in favour of a limited union--an impossible union as it proved--with the unexpressed powers retained by the States. "The states," said he, "can best govern our home concerns and the general government our foreign ones." In later years he could remember but one instance of control vested in the Federal over the State authorities in a matter purely domestic, and that was the metallic tenders. Nor could he be said to be opposed to the Federalists as a whole, since he never recognised the party, but simply a few of its leaders. The latter were for the moment misleading the people. He expected in time to win all back except "the Coryphaei," or leaders, whom he p.r.o.nounced incurables. One of the first unpleasant revelations to Jefferson as President was the fact that a sufficient number of the people to const.i.tute a party would persist in remaining under the influence of Hamilton and his fellows in several of the States.

The man who depends thus upon the people and appeals to them as his monitor must risk the charge of demagogism. Every action differing from custom will be considered a bid for popular applause. "Jeffersonian simplicity" has been ridiculed as a masquerade for a purpose. Yet it was a protest against Old World imitation. Never was a salutation made or an address presented to Was.h.i.+ngton or Adams at an opening of Congress that Jefferson did not see in it a warning of imminent monarchy. He applauded the democratic firmness, called "stubbornness" by the Federalists, of Matthew Lyon, the only member of the House of Representatives who steadfastly refused to march in procession to the residence of President Adams in order to present to him the accustomed complimentary address and to partake of his refreshments. Clearly it was the duty of a President of the people to abolish these borrowed forms of royalty. When elected Vice-President, Jefferson requested that he might be notified by mail instead of by a messenger. No notification of his election to the Presidency was necessary since he was presiding over the Senate when elected by the House.

The embryonic city of Was.h.i.+ngton, surrounded by dense woods, was the scene of Jefferson's inauguration, and it afforded little for the ceremonies except democratic simplicity. It was announced in advance that no "white wands" would be carried, in the British style, at this inauguration. Republican papers had predicted that

"Philosoph's reign the world will bless, Join'd with religion's simpler dress.

Truth in homely garb shall s.h.i.+ne, On every state, in every clime."

The inauguration plans provided only a salute from the company of Alexandria riflemen who paraded before the lodgings of the President-elect, an escort of citizens and members of Congress to the Senate wing of the unfinished Capitol, and an inconsiderable illumination at night. At a later time, in an effort to magnify Jeffersonian simplicity, the story was invented that the President-elect rode unattended to Capitol hill and tied his horse to a tree near the spring.

Since Jefferson had been deprived of his wife by death many years before, the social problem was greatly simplified. Hospitable to extravagance in his home, as President he must reduce his entertainment to the simplicity becoming a republic. He soon formulated as part of his social program: "Levees are done away with. The first communication to the next Congress will be, like all subsequent ones, by message, to which no answer will be expected." In thus tr.i.m.m.i.n.g away the useless ceremonials which had so far attended the beginning of each session of Congress, obviously copied, as previously said, from the opening of a session of Parliament, Jefferson was contributing to American individuality and common sense.

The task of restoring the Union to the form the fathers had meant for it and revoking the prerogatives unconst.i.tutionally given to it was uppermost in Jefferson's mind. The bank had been chartered for twenty years and was beyond reach at present. The Sedition law and the Alien Friends act had expired by limitation before Jefferson came in. The Alien Enemies act was harmless because it rested entirely with the President for execution and was valid only during a foreign war; since it might be useful later it was allowed to remain on the statute book.

But the odious excise, the stamp taxes, and carriage licenses could be repealed, the probationary period for naturalisation could be reduced to the former limit, work on the great war-s.h.i.+ps could be stopped, the provisional army allowed to disband, and Hamilton and other generals cut off from the public treasury. The vast appropriations for the army and navy and the coast defences could be reduced, and the expense of the ornamental consular service cut down. As rapidly as possible, Congress carried out these reform suggestions of the new President.

The Federalists deplored his penny-wise economy, especially when fifteen s.h.i.+ps, which had cost the Government nearly a million dollars, were sold for one-fourth that amount.

The work of reform did not stop here. Two branches of the National Government had been brought back to democratic principles by the will of the people. But the third branch, the Judiciary, remained in the control of the "monarchists." Jefferson first did justice, as he conceived it, to Lyon, the only prisoner remaining convicted under the Sedition law. No doubt some of the Federal judges had been overzealous in securing the conviction of offenders under this law. Holding life tenure under the Const.i.tution, they could be reached only by impeachment. This remedy was attempted in order to punish Judge Chase, an a.s.sociate Justice of the Supreme Court, who had shown partiality, it was claimed, in the trial of Fries and Callender five years before.

The requisite two-thirds of the Senate did not vote him guilty, and this method of curbing the Judiciary failed. "Impeachment is not even a scarecrow," admitted the disappointed President. The enemy had retired into the stronghold of the Judiciary, as he said, to be fed from the treasury, and from thence to beat down Republicanism. "By a fraudulent use of the Const.i.tution," he explained, "which has made judges irremovable, they have multiplied useless judges merely to strengthen their phalanx."

In this indictment, Jefferson referred to the act of the closing days of the Federalists, whereby the number of Federal courts had been increased to twenty-seven. It had been done by creating six circuit courts, with judges, marshals, and attorneys, instead of requiring the district judges and Supreme Court justices to make up these courts as had been done under the Judiciary Act of 1789. The excuse for the creation of these medium courts was that too much labour had been imposed upon the judges and justices by the old method. But the Republicans believed it had been done to make places for a large number of irremovable Federalist office-holders. By another act, a circuit court, with three judges, was created for the District of Columbia, with an elaborate system of justices' courts and justices of the peace.

To fill the large number of places thus created, the pen of John Adams had been kept busy up to the last hour of his administration. Hence the "midnight appointments," as they were commonly known. Some of the district judges were advanced to the new circuit judges.h.i.+ps, and their places filled by the district attorneys. These were "nominated for promotion," as the message to the Senate termed it.

Not only would this presumably hostile force be in Jefferson's camp, but their salaries would seriously interfere with his plans for retrenchment. The Const.i.tution distinctly provided that "judges both of the supreme and inferior courts shall hold offices during good behavior." But before the first session of Congress under his administration was ended, Jefferson wrote that they had "lopped off a parasite limb, planted by our predecessors on the judiciary body for party purposes." How had it been done? By pa.s.sing a new judiciary act, which abolished the whole system of circuit courts, with their judges and minor officials, and subst.i.tuted the old practice of requiring the Supreme and district judges to perform the labours of the circuit courts. No life tenure would hold for an office which did not exist.

The anathemas of the "promoted" officials, thus fallen between stools, added to the pleasure of the Jeffersonians. The names of twenty-two unfortunates, whom the Senate failed to find time to ratify in the closing hours, were recalled by Jefferson, under the caption, "Nominated but not appointed."

Midnight of the 3rd of March had caught forty-one of the proposed Federal justices of the peace for the District of Columbia without their appointment having been fully made. Jefferson arbitrarily cut down their number to twenty-five, "having been thought too many," as he said. Among those dropped were four whose commissions had been made out and sealed by the acting Secretary of State, but had not been delivered. Madison, who became Secretary of State under Jefferson, refused to deliver the commissions, and the men, headed by one William Marbury, made a motion in the Federal court to obtain them. They had no recourse in the State courts. From this trivial circ.u.mstance, involving the least national judiciary office, came the case of Marbury vs. Madison, involving the right of the judiciary branch of the Federal Government to give an order to the executive.

One phase of the relation of these two branches had been established nearly ten years before, when President Was.h.i.+ngton attempted to get an interpretation from the Supreme Court upon the binding clauses of the vexatious treaty with France. He was told that the court was not an advisory body, but a tribunal established to adjudge specific cases brought before it. For this advisory service, the Executive must depend upon his Attorney-General. About the same time, the United States circuit courts protested against an act of Congress which made them recipients of pension applications subject to the final decision of the War Department. Evidently the Judiciary intended to remain independent of both the other branches of the National Government.

One feature of the relations.h.i.+p between the Federal courts and the Congress had been presumed to exist by Hamilton and other commentators on the Const.i.tution, viz., the power to adjudge of the rights of individuals under an act of Congress. This principle of pa.s.sing on the const.i.tutionality of a legislative act by the courts had been established in at least five States before the adoption of the Const.i.tution. It had been exercised in several cases by the Federal courts before the case of Marbury _vs._ Madison arose. A new contention was involved by asking whether the request made to the Supreme Court to issue a mandamus would hold against the provisions of the Const.i.tution, which did not include mandamus in the powers specifically given to the court.

It chanced that the case came before John Marshall, who had recently a.s.sumed the station of Chief Justice, to which John Adams appointed him in the closing months of his administration. The previous history of the court, with the exception of two or three cases, had been insignificant. Its decisions during the first ten years do not fill as many pages as do those for a single year at the present time. Jay had resigned its heads.h.i.+p to undertake the mission to England, impressed with the belief, as he afterward said, that the court could never obtain the energy, weight, and dignity essential to affording due support to the National Government. He refused to return to the bench, and Marshall was appointed, with whom the second era of the court begins. Marshall was a Virginian, a school-fellow of Monroe, and co-worker with Madison in the Virginia Const.i.tutional Convention. But the war acquaintance which he formed with Was.h.i.+ngton and Hamilton, added to his personal views, turned him toward Federalism. As a Virginian, he was cultivated by members of that party, office after office being placed at his option. Accepting the Chief-Justices.h.i.+p under a life tenure, he was "saddled" on the Republicans, as they said.

The decision in the case of Marbury _vs._ Madison was one of many which emanated from Marshall, silently shoring up the fabric of the Union as it was erected by the hand of necessity. "The theory that an act of legislature repugnant to the Const.i.tution is void," said the Chief Justice, in granting Marbury and others the withheld commissions, through the district court, "is essential to a written const.i.tution, and is consequently to be considered by this court as one of the fundamental principles of our society." We speak so easily now of declaring a law unconst.i.tutional, thereby rendering it null and void, and we acquiesce so readily in these decisions that it is difficult to imagine the small beginnings of this great power exercised by one branch of the Federal Government over another. By holding that the mandamus must issue from the District and not the Supreme Court, the case might have been dismissed briefly. The Republicans thought the long disquisition on the powers of the court and its relation to the executive branch a kind of defiance and entirely unwarranted. It was the beginning of a long list of similar offences by Marshall.

Meanwhile the new Administration had continued its reform activities, "to restore the government to its principles, amend its defects, reform abuses, and introduce order and economy in the administration," as Monroe outlined it to President Jefferson. The latter summed up the reform work of the Republicans at the end of the first session:

"They have reduced the army and navy to what is barely necessary. They are disarming executive patronage and preponderances by putting down one-half the offices of the United States which are no longer necessary.

These economies have enabled them to suppress all the internal taxes and still to make such provision for the payment of their public debt as to discharge that in eighteen years. They are opening the doors of hospitality to fugitives from the oppressions of other countries; and we have suppressed all those public forms and ceremonies which tended to familiarize the public eye to the harbingers of another form of government."

Thus had democracy, in Jefferson's opinion, at last come into its own.

CHAPTER XV

STRICT CONSTRUCTION AN IMPOSSIBILITY

Sixty years of almost uninterrupted Republican-Democratic administration were inaugurated with Thomas Jefferson in 1801. This period was auspiciously begun by correcting the abuses wrought in the National Government by the twelve years of Federalism. It was ended by the faithful adherence of the party to the slavery system, to which it was bound both by geographic strength and the principles of individualism.

The period was apparently long enough to allow the party to give the Union such a bias toward decentralisation that it could never recover its power and prestige. How the compelling laws of organised society, the needs of the people in their conquest of the wilderness, and the necessity of providing for the common defence and the general welfare prevented such an unfortunate consummation makes up the middle period of the story of the United States.

It was easy for the new administrators to show in theory how the Central Government should be restricted to certain actions; it was impossible to avoid entering upon certain new activities as progress demanded from time to time. Take such a simple matter as the national capital.

Suddenly transferred to the woods on the banks of the Potomac, the National Government found no such accommodations as the two cities in which it had previously been lodged had afforded. One completed and one incomplete wing of the Capitol building, an empty and bare President's mansion, one tavern, and a few houses, with streets indicated only by felled trees, formed the Athens of America, p.r.o.nounced by Robert Morris the very best city in the world for a "future"

residence. Members of Congress who traversed the three miles of mud road to Georgetown, where the only comfortable lodgings were to be obtained, would willingly have reduced the scale upon which the capital was laid out. Very early it became the "City of Magnificent Distances."

However crude the city might be, the soil on which it rested belonged exclusively to the United States. It was the only spot of any magnitude which could be so claimed. It was due to the generosity of two neighouring States, Virginia and Maryland. To the same charity was owed the money which had partly built the two wings of the Capitol and the President's mansion. Nevertheless, land and buildings do not make a city. Money for the construction of streets, it was at first supposed, would come from the sale of lots. "Path-ways" were built from this resource under direction of members of the Cabinet before the Government was transferred from Philadelphia. Money was advanced on such expectation both by Congress and by the State of Maryland. Yet the advent of Government and the inauguration of Jefferson found the work incomplete. Members of Congress who stepped gingerly in their low shoes over the paths made of chips of stone from the new buildings, or who attempted the mile of cleared roadway between the two administration buildings, received an object lesson in the necessity for improvements which speedily overcame conscientious scruples.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE CITY OF WAs.h.i.+NGTON. A drawing made about 1800 before the site was graded. The Capitol is seen at the left of the masts.]

Any expenditure for such purposes could find warrant in the Const.i.tution only through the implied powers theory. "To exercise exclusive legislation" over the District might mean to construct sidewalks and to grade streets; but it was not so expressed. So urgent became the necessity, that in 1803 an appropriation for buildings was made to include the repair of the highway between the Capitol and the other public buildings. The expenditure of this money, as Jefferson afterwards boasted, was confined carefully to the avenue between the Capitol and Mansion hills and to the squares about them. As time went on and the city grew, specific appropriations had to be made for the construction of streets and roadways within the District. These were wrung annually from the reluctant party. To the disgust of people living in more remote parts of the District, the first of these sums was spent entirely in widening Pennsylvania Avenue, planting it with trees, in replacing its wooden culverts with brick, in repairing the public squares about the buildings, and in grading the slope in front of the War Office.

"It cannot be supposed," replied Jefferson to one protestant, "that Congress intended to tax the people of the United States at large for all avenues in Was.h.i.+ngton and roads in the District of Columbia."

Trivial as these incidents must appear in comparison with the present att.i.tude of the Government toward the District, they serve to ill.u.s.trate the law of compulsion. Numerous others might be introduced here. The Jeffersonians inherited from the Federalists a small collection of books and maps, which had been purchased for the use of the members of Congress deprived of the library facilities they had enjoyed in the cities of New York and Philadelphia. It was the beginning of the present magnificent Library of Congress. Instead of casting aside the volumes and returning the unexpended balance to the treasury, the strict constructionists adopted the library and soon began to make direct appropriations for it, crowning the action in 1815 by expending twenty-three thousand dollars for the purchase of Jefferson's own library to be added to the collection.

Thus did the seat of government and its needs drive another wedge of loose construction into close-grained theory. To have exclusive control over a district not exceeding ten miles square meant not only police control, but it meant to make a home fit for the national seat of government, and to provide for the necessities of its representatives.

Nevertheless conscientious scruples and n.i.g.g.ardly appropriations had sufficient weight for many years to make the home of the Union a disgrace to the nation and a thing of contempt in comparison with the capitals of other lands.

If the strict constructionists had inaugurated the National Government, their task of confining it within a certain limit would not have been so difficult. There is little doubt that the power to "regulate commerce" was intended originally to cover the collection of a national impost. But if United States custom-houses were to collect duties on imported goods, they must erect lighthouses, build piers, and dredge channels in order to get the goods into the harbours. The States, having surrendered the benefits of an impost to the National Government, were not likely to undertake or continue such works on an adequate scale. No permission to engage in such enterprises was to be found in the Const.i.tution except as deduced from the power stated above. The encouragement of foreign commerce had been almost a fetich with the Federalists. They had freely granted appropriations for such purposes.